Archive for June, 2009

I read all of Le Carre’s early books and enjoyed them tremendously; especially “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. Then the old PBS version of Tinker with Alec Guiness was beautiful. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, he hit a bad spell for me with his non European based and post cold war contexts. I stopped in the middle of reading “Constant Gardener” as it seemed a forced and politically correct tale (Later, I did enjoy the movie version).
Absolute Friends was written immediately after Constant Gardener in the late 1990, but it relies on a Cold War context. I enjoyed reading it, but it failed to create a central mystery and lacked suspense or direction for long descriptive or polemic stretches. But, overall the writing is excellent and parts of it are gripping. The finale provides a very good case for paranoia and for conspiracy theorists.
Overall, it was not great, but not a regret either.